Christopher Knight tells us why Republican’s ideas to cut the arts are stupid:
If you gave me a buck, and next year I returned $18.75 to you, would you think that was a good deal? I would. With savings accounts, money markets and even stocks yielding just a few percentage points on investments these days, a return in excess of 1800% is pretty staggering. Yet, that’s what happens with federal support for arts and culture. It pays for itself 18 times over.
I have a hard time believing the multiplier on Arts spending is THAT good, especially when really effective stimulus measures like infrastructure spending generate about 1.59 dollars in economic activity for every dollar spent. (Yes, I know the figures he and I are talking about are different, with Knight talking about government outlays vs. what they take in on Arts income taxes. Surely Knight’s numbers don’t tell you much, other than that people are donating to the arts, or that people are paying to experience art). I’d rather see a figure like the GDP multiplier from Mark Zandi to determine the real stimulative power of arts spending, but that’s way out of my expertise area. I’m not saying this to pooh pooh the idea that arts spending isn’t a good way to spend money (I’ll bet it is very stimulative, not to mention the well, ehrm, Art we get), I just don’t think that looking at government support vs. sector revenues tells us much.
Update: On the other hand I have seen some figures in the past that puts the Arts GDP multiplier at 3 or 6, but I couldn’t find the source or research method that the author(s) got the figure from.
I was thinking as I wrote a paper about Arvo Pärt about this comic below, but how it pertained to music. When people who aren’t really informed about early classical music listen, they probably can’t tell the difference between the Ars Nova and other renaissance music (maybe not even that and medieval or Baroque!). Even though the differences in the musics are so great, it would worse than someone listening to high Romantic music and high Classical and declaring them the same.
What in writing a paper on Pärt led me to think of this? In his work Te Deum he uses musical effects coming from medieval church music (responsory and chant) and the idea of drones drawn from medieval Eastern Orthodox music (mind you medieval Eastern Orthodox music was the dominant music of the Orthodox church well into the west’s Baroque period). You might ask, “well what’s the problem, he is using medieval music!” The problem is that they come from very different geographies. Clumping these two musics together is like saying Ravi Shankar and Bobby McFerrin belong in the same category of music. Essentially because the effects Pärt is using are “old” sounding, listeners generalize and say, “Oh what wonderful medieval music!”
It’s only a joke, and it’s one I’ve made myself in the past. It usually begins with someone discussing composers and Philip Glass being brought up. At which point the wittier (not) among us go, “Philip Glass, Philip Glass, Philip Glass, Philip Glass, Philip Glass…etc…” The problem with this is that it would be far more accurate to make this joke in discussions of La Monte Young. So, if you’re considering making this joke about poor Mr. Glass, restrain yourself and only make it when Mr. Young is brought up. Classical music geeks will appreciate the accuracy more. In fact, if you do this, you’ll be performing one of La Monte’s own pieces (granted you annoy your friends and carry on the joke for a while):
Arabic Numeral (Any Integer) to H.F. (April 1960), popularly known as X for Henry Flynt, requires the performer to repeat a loud, heavy sound every one to two seconds as uniformly and as regularly as possible for a long period of time.
Ok, so it’s not exact, but nor is the other joke (Harrumph!).
An unpopular music genre doesn’t make a city ‘world class’ … The phrase ‘world class’ is a propaganda technique used by those who want to shove things down our throats.
Get rid of them, the Ballet and any other useless tax funded ‘entertainment’ that isnt self supporting.
Face it, this isn’t about the music. It is about Louisville being able to say, ‘We have an orchestra.’ Then all the old stuffed shirts go to the concerts to be seen by other old stuffed shirts. Boring. Hire some clowns to spice things up.
Pack up your fiddles and go home boys and girls. Maybe find real jobs. Go to Nashville and vie for some sessions work. If you are worth your salt you’ll survive there, maybe even flourish.
Sale all of assets to pay these people off, fire them all and get rid of the Orchestra. It isnt popular with the residents or they would have packed crowds and not have to worry about $$$.
This whole thing is stupid. The orchestra creates a product. That product has lost public appeal. Just like any business, this one needs to shut down. If your product isn’t selling there is no reason to continue in business.
One of the biggest mistakes scientists ever made in the whole ‘what to do about global warming’ debate was refusing to go out and debate idiots or shills who are wholly invested in our fossil fuel economy. Essentially, it gave the deniers control of the debate and the ability to move public opinion with no push-back. We should not be lackadaisical about smacking down assholes who don’t know what they’re talking about.
From the footnotes of the chapter Sounding Icons in his book on Pärt:
“Pärt’s own example has helped liberate many composers from a sense of duty towards gestural dissonance, and there has been a proliferation of scores (especially in the choral world) featuring slow tempos and diatonic absolutism to show this! Even though it must be admitted, and without surprise, that many of these lack Pärt’s precision and imaginative intensity, one can at the very least welcome the lack of pretension, and indeed the practicality of such music, often representing the only kind of new music that amateur choirs can dream of attempting. This is a far from unimportant contribution to contemporary music’s biggest task: to rebuild its constituency through the re-establishment of a common musical language, or rather a plurality of mutually intelligible languages!” (2)
Sick burn on modernism and post-modernism there. It’s a nice idea and pretty words, but who gets to judge (and how) what the common musical language is, or what the plurality of mutually intelligible languages are? The Invisible Hand? A faceless panel of voting music critics or scholars? A burning eye on top of a tower?
Here’s a work that’s essentially fresh off the press for Solo viola (or violin). The story behind this one; my friend Holly Nelson asked me to write a work for solo violin for her recital/contemporary requirement for grad auditions. Needing to generate material quickly, I wrote her a violin piece, but on my instrument (viola). So it’s really a viola piece, but it can be played on violin. I used material from works that I had written before but have not completed yet for the introduction and ending of the work (the lyrical lines over C [or G] drones). There are two versions: For Viola, and For Violin. The only difference is the transposition.
This isn’t actually a review of Adam’s review, but I wanted to highlight a few quotes from Adams in the “Up Front” section of the book review:
“Cage helped to open my awareness and acceptance of sound — all sounds, not just the pitches of the musical scale. And he set an example for liberating musical forms from the hand-me-down archetypes of European tradition. I don’t agree with those who consider Cage the most important composer after Stravinsky. I think much of his later work is fundamentally, even tediously, didactic. A work like ‘4′33″’ is a demonstration, a lesson in how to listen, so to speak. But to equate its artistic value, as some have, with a work like ‘The Rite of Spring’ is to confuse art with philosophy.”
And:
“He was a great entertainer and endlessly imaginative. But history, at least up to now, has not proved him an avatar here. People want feeling from music, whether it’s Mahler or Coltrane. Music is the most powerfully expressive of the arts, and to deny that critical element of feeling, as Cage did, is to render it largely cold and static.”
It seems to me that Adam’s accepts the philosophical ideas of Cage, grudgingly, but doesn’t wholeheartedly throw himself behind the idea that any sounds, or amalgam of sounds can be beautiful in and of themselves and moving in that way. Cage wouldn’t mind whether their existence came about through a process involving chance. I tend to fall more on Adam’s side of this debate in that I don’t think that most people will find deep emotions in music developed this way, but to say that Cage was actively denying feeling from his music, just because he was trying to detach his “ego” might be a stretch.
Just watch this video, which I’ve posted before and tell me that “lov[ing] the activity of sounds” isn’t an emotionally deep statement. Also tell me who replaced Cage as Winnie the Pooh’s voice actor when he died.
In light of Q2 posting Circles and Lines’ latest concert on their Live Concert Series broadcast page and linking to my website, I thought I’d speak a little bit about how the mission of this website has changed over the few years it has been around. When I originally started posting on this website, most of the online databases of free, out of copyright music were hopeless. IMSLP had just gotten back up and running around the time I began this site after it had struggled through a period of dealing with DMCA take down notices and other copyright issues and other vital websites like mutopia are kind of crappy in design and interface. Not only that, but the scores that IMSLP and other websites had acquired were not very useful to actively performing musicians (but incredibly useful to scholars). What I mean by this, is that players couldn’t get their hands on many orchestral parts, or solo repertoire that had been written before the US copyright-public domain border.
What I intended to do, was explore libraries and with a notebook scanner, scan works that were of a more practical use (to most players) than Scarletti’s nth trio sonata. I figured that damaged, or written on parts could be digitally cleaned (I actually ended up doing this with a particularly dirty version of Bartok’s 1st String Quartet that IMSLP had hosted).
At first, I was going to throw up this word press blog, just as a way to give the fruits of my “meanwhile efforts” someplace to go while I learned PHP and other database management languages. The plan was to create a better version of IMSLP that would also function as a social network (this idea hasn’t totally been put to rest, but it has for this particular domain), hence the “Opensourcemusic”. But as time wore on and the resources that other websites had at their disposal, whether it be man-power or knowledge, far surpassed mine, and my performing and composing took more time of my life, I shifted the focus of this blog to be more personal. That’s why you’ll see more of my thinking and reacting in mostly uninformed ways on this website than masses of sheet music links.
